To boldly go where no one has gone before is a great opportunity for two firms involved in the design of Virgin’s Galactic project.

Project description

It’s not often that an architect or designer gets to sit down with a blank piece of paper and design something that’s never been done before – but that’s happened to both Foster + Partners and Seymourpowell. They are designing Spaceport America, the New Mexico base from which Virgin Galactic will start flying in 2011, and the spaceship interiors, respectively.

It’s the second phase of the race into space; this time it’s the turn of the ordinary Joes – ordinary, give or take a few million, in most cases. A mere $200,000 will secure you one of the six seats aboard the Virgin spaceship and, apparently, it’s not all filthy-rich rocket-men and women: a few second mortgages have also been taken out to make dreams come true.

In fact, Fosters’ client isn’t actually Virgin, it’s the New Mexico Space Authority, which has seen the potential of future space flight and just happens to have a piece of land in the shadow of a missile base. This means no commercial flights go over the area to interrupt space flights, and that’s pretty damn rare in the USA. A second base is also planned for an existing space facility in Sweden.

So when you come to designing something that has no precedent, exactly where do you start? Well, one place seems to be by ignoring the initial visualisation work carried out on the project by Philippe Starck – neither Fosters nor Seymourpowell used his vision as any kind of starting point.

With all of Fosters’ airport experience, you would perhaps think that would be the icking-off point but, fascinatingly, director Grant Brooker likens this project more to an airfield than an airport because of the low-volume use and the intimacy of it. ‘It’s like a small airport building from the past – much more in that pioneering spirit. We’re only dealing with handfuls of people to start with,’ he says.

‘We really wanted to play with that direct connection. As you walk through the building, you pass just above and through where the hangar spaces are, so you are looking at the spaceships and carrier aircraft – they are being serviced inside the building you are in. It’s very immediate and very real. We liked that Right Stuff kind of feel. They are going out of atmosphere and there are only a small number of people in history who have made that journey. We thought that was something great to build on.’

Fosters set out to create a building that fits and is informed by its purpose and the surrounding environment. There are basically three elements to the building: a control and training area, and two hangars. These have been wrapped up in an organic shape that affords very different views from various directions, including from above.

Spaceport America is within a powerful stone’s throw of the much eulogised, 600-mile El Camino horse and mule trail that originates in Mexico. Brooker says they were very mindful of not impacting on that. The building actually stands only 15m above the ground at its highest point. ‘OK, we’re building a runway, but in the scale of the area it’s just like a line on the ground when viewed horizontally from a distance,’ he says.

‘We didn’t want the building to suddenly leap out of the landscape. We had a whole series of agendas about how the building would grow out of the ground, particularly when viewed from the trail side. And then, also symbolically, the building has to register, so we concentrated on the view from above and the view from the runway.

‘When you are looking back from the runway, that’s when the building has a very open side and you see the two vaults that are the hangars and the main vault that is the controller operating space. We’ve tried to give the feeling that the building is floating above the runway on that side.

‘So it has a big presence when you view it from the east, but when you are in the west looking east, it grows out of the ground. I think pulling these things together and addressing those parts of the requirement [is] why we won the [design] competition, really.’

Fosters is currently in the detailed design stage, with the project due on site soon and the base is expected to be complete within a year and a half. Meanwhile, Seymourpowell is keeping its fingers crossed that it’s going to be involved in the final production design for the spaceship itself.

The consultancy, which has a wealth of transport experience, including aerospace, was brought on board to create the conceptual interiors and, even more than Fosters, found that it was a case of form following function.

‘You can’t lavish any luxury on the passengers because of the weight,’ says Seymourpowell associate director, Richard Smith. ‘Weight is a huge factor. An enormous amount of fuel is required for every extra kilo, and at some point it tips the scales and simply won’t work. So if it ain’t necessary, it ain’t going up.’

As you can imagine, the interiors are stripped right back to pretty much four dials for information plus the seats. And the seats have received a huge amount of attention. They have to help the astronauts cope with the 6gs (six times the force of gravity) they will experience, both on the way up and back. Then there are vertical g forces, which act down the body instead of perpendicular to it – the heart can’t pump enough blood to the brain and you pass out.

‘If everyone was a fighter pilot, they’d be absolutely fine with it, but they are not going to be,’ says Smith. ‘So that’s where the seat design comes from: the demands are pretty extreme. It’s known that a percentage of people will pass out and you have to help people with that, so the seat tilts. You have to orientate people appropriately according to the direction of the g-force.’

‘The seats also need to be able to recline flat to the floor to be out of the way when the spaceship reaches zero gravity, so that the astronauts can float around unhindered for around five minutes.’

That’s the business end of the design work, but what about the aesthetics – the styling of the experience? Minimalism was always going to be the order of the day, but within that there’s still room for manoeuvre, as Smith points out:

‘There’s always room for aesthetic – there’s always more than one way to design things. With the design of the seat, they are fully carbon-shelled, with very thin scrims of Tempra Foam, but you can still deliver on that clean aesthetic. The aesthetics of this is a hard one, though; because all the sorts of things we wanted to do we hit a brick wall in terms of weight and feasibility.

‘Underlying the whole brief is that you have to deliver on people’s expectations. There aren’t any precedents for space tourism, so you naturally lean on [feature] films; whether that’s appropriate or not is another conversation. People have this expectation that it’s going to be all white – where does that come from? The obvious answer is [Stanley] Kubrick’s 2001.’

Whether it ends up white or not, and our guess is it’s more than likely, you can be sure that a variation on Seymourpowell’s minimalist aesthetic will be what confronts these pioneering space tourists when they blast off from New Mexico in the early part of the next decade.

About 250 people have already signed up for what Richard Branson has already started calling his ‘spaceline’. You could book a ticket there, or maybe you’d prefer to sign up for one of a number of reality- TV shows offering space flight as the final prize, which are apparently already in the pipeline.